Once the best of friends, comrades in arms, the leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea are now at each other's throats. The brutal conflict along their border may well reflect ambitions to restore an empire destroyed 1500 years ago. Franz Schurmann writes extensively on international affairs. In the winter and spring of 1995 he traveled and worked in East Africa.

In March 1995, I was invited by the Ethiopian government to the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Tigreyan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in Makele, in the northeastern part of the country.

I was seated some 15 feet from Meles Zenawi and Isaias Afwerki, then as now the top leaders, respectively, of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Their small children played around their chairs while we all waited to see a film documentary on the Tigreyan victory against the Ethiopian "red dictator" Haile Mariyam Mengistu. The two leaders, close comrades in their common liberation struggle, talked animatedly to each other in their shared mother language, Tigrinya, a Semitic language similar to Hebrew and Arabic.

Now deep hatred divides the two. Each hurls epithets like "murderer" against the other as they once did together against Mengistu. Since the upsurge of war in mid-May thousands of Eritrean soldiers and civilians have been killed and maimed by Ethiopian forces. Ethiopian soldiers, too, have died and been maimed by the thousands.

In 1995, on the way to Eritrea's capital Asmara, I saw a huge village inhabited by thousands of soldiers maimed by Ethiopians during the 30 years of the Eritrean independence struggle. A little later, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, I saw Ethiopian war maimed among the hordes of beggars with outstretched hands. It won't be long until the newly-maimed join them.

No wonder that the moment he heard that Ethiopian troops had attacked, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan called the war "stupid."

Tigreyans, on both sides of the border, have a unique history. To the northwest of Makele is the ancient city of Axum, center of the most powerful and prosperous empire in Africa from the 1st to the 7th century. It dominated the lucrative Red Sea trade.

In the early 600s the influence of Christian Axum was fast rising partly through its Bible written in the Semitic Ge'ez language at a time when Meccan Arabs had no written script. But suddenly the Prophet Muhammad appeared and his divine revelations were soon written down in the new Arabic script. As Arab warriors, clenching Koran and sword, fanned out over Africa and Asia Axum disintegrated along with the mighty Eastern Roman and Persian empires.

Until the 1880s Ethiopia withdrew from history -- Coptic Christianity looked to eternity, not reality. But European imperialism finally drove the Ethiopians to action. A dynamic new monarch took power and named himself Menelik II after the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, who lived 3000 years earlier.

Menelik II was a strong leader. In 1896 his armies defeated the Italians -- the first time Africans halted the seemingly unstoppable waves of European imperialism. Yet he also ceded a strip of territory, given the Greek name Eritrea, to the Italians and founded a new capital, Addis Ababa, in the center of the country.

These moves not only gave Ethiopia security and independence but also a chance to learn about the modern world through the Italians. Even today Italian is still widely spoken in both countries and the influence of Italian culture is present as well.

Menelik II called up the glories of Axum. When the Italian leader Benito Mussolini transported Axum's 100 feet tall obelisk to Rome in 1936, those memories began to burn bright especially among the new educated class of young Ethiopians.

In 1963 Addis Ababa became the permanent headquarters of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Mengistu seized power in 1977, allied himself with the Soviet Union and was convinced Ethiopia was fast becoming the great power in the Horn of Africa.

In 1991, Mengistu fell and Eritrea gained its independence. Tigreyans were in power in both countries. Until 1998, it seemed that Meles Zenawi was concentrating on decentralizing power in Ethiopia, fostering development and politically stabilizing the country. Isaias Afwerki instead began showing his power in the Red Sea. He occupied several Yemeni islands and formed close ties to Israel.

In late 1997, Afwerki suddenly introduced a new Eritrean currency, the nakfa. He intended it as a replacement for the Ethiopian birr that had served as Eritrea's national currency. This meant that all cross-border trade had to be denominated in hard currency.

Afwerki was likely impelled to this act by the realization that Eritrea was floundering. Virtually everything for sale from food to automobiles was imported. Eritrea's rocky terrain made agriculture difficult and the rich fishing resources were exploited by others.

Meles Zenawi regarded his former comrade's acts as a violation of the sacred memory of Axum. War was inevitable and came in 1998 when Afwerki's forces attacked. And, after a brief truce, it has now returned. It was Ethiopia's turn to invade. But this time it's likely that Washington has quietly written off Eritrea as a lost cause.

What the world could soon see is the emergence of Ethiopia as East Africa's great power. For many Ethiopians that would be a revival of the ancient Axum Empire.